Digital Gateway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean

ongoing

ATMED-DG project consists in a main cable running between Lisbon (Portugal) to Mazara del Vallo (Italy), becoming the largest and faster submarine optical fibre line in the Mediterranean Sea and, therefore, setting the basis for the Mediterranean Data Gateway. During the pathway of this main cable, multiple branching units (BUs) will connect multiple European Landing Sites to the main cable. Those landing sites are Zahara de los Atunes, Torreguadiaro and Barcelona (Spain), and Marseille (France). Although there are multiple submarine cable lines in the Mediterranean Sea, all these cables normally pass through the Mediterranean Sea to connect with other continents (specially Asia and the Middle East), connecting only with few Mediterranean European Data Ports, and majorly with Marseille and Sicily. Therefore, the connectivity of the Mediterranean zones of Europe is performed using small infrastructures, that does not offer the quality and capacity needed. Moreover, this issue will get worse in the future years, where it is expected an important increase in the connectivity demand by 2030 together with the end-of-life of some of those Mediterranean Cables. And, differently from current cables, MEDUSA cable will not only pass through the Mediterranean, but will connect multiple Data Ports of the European Mediterranean Regions, providing high-speed, high-quality connection to all these zones. ATMED-DG will offer the first open access cable enabling third parties to use the existing network infrastructure. It and will allow to have 10X-20X more capacity, provide Point of Presence (PoP) to PoP connectivity and have much less maintenance cost.